Reverse: 1999 Unexpected Audience Trail Riddle Guide

As a game largely about mysteries and unravelling the truth of the world, Reverse: 1999 is full of little moments of strangeness and intrigue. Aside from the rather baffling main story and confusing terminology, there are a lot of smaller moments where the game will ask you to answer a question or recite some information you’ve previously learned. Answering these questions correctly will often yield beneficial rewards, including Clear Drop, the currency used to pull on Reverse’s gacha banners. As such, you’ll want to be uncovering and finding all of the little riddles – known commonly as Trails – that you can. 

Unexpected Audience is one of the riddles you’ll encounter on your journey through R1999’s main story. It comes towards the back half of the game in a rather narrative-heavy moment and asks you to remember some innocuous information from earlier on in the narrative. Manage to do so and you’ll be awarded with some in-game materials and a small amount of Clear Drop.

Here’s the answer to the Unexpected Audience Trail in Reverse 1999. 

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What Are Trail Riddles in Reverse 1999?

As you go from mission to mission in each of Reverse 1999’s main chapters, you’ll often come across little side activities or stories known as Trails. These manifest on the map as small yellow symbols, with each symbol denoting a different activity: sometimes, the Trails will have you fight a small group of foes to proceed whereas others will ask you to answer a question or hold a dialogue with some strange disembodied voice who seems to know Vertin quite well.

Most of the time, you’ll need to complete a certain set of Trails to progress and unlock more parts of the main story. However, some Trails (like Unexpected Audience) are completely optional meaning that it’s possible to miss the rewards from them. These optional Trails will often reward small amounts of Clear Drop for solving them, with other rewards including more lore and records to add to the Atlas.

Some of the riddle-based Trails can be pretty difficult, especially because they require you to dig through previous sections of the story to uncover the answers. 

Freedom of the Dumb

Unexpected Audience Trail Riddle

Unexpected Audience is one of the final Trails you’ll encounter at the end of Reverse 1999’s third chapter, ‘Nouvelles et Textes pour Rien’. In order to unlock Unexpected Audience, you’ll need to reach mission 3TH-15 (or just mission 3-15) which is called ‘The Other Future’. This is the penultimate mission for Chapter 3.

Before you enter the mission and face the final obstacle standing between you and escape from the Foundation, you should notice a Trail symbol on the map. This symbol will be a small yellow chess piece, similar to the ones which denote various characters throughout the game. 

Upon clicking the Trail at Chapter 3-15, you’ll be prompted with a question:

“George the Oak is already 700 years old. Which animals in the tree listened to that song with you?”

Unexpected Audience Question, Reverse: 1999

3TH-15, The Other Future

R1999 Unexpected Audience Answer

To correctly answer the above question, you’ll need to put the answer as ‘Red Squirrels and Woodpeckers’. The game is a bit finicky when it comes to spelling, capitalisation and punctuation so make sure that you have it spelt correctly if it doesn’t accept it the first time round. If it still doesn’t work, try it with different capitalisations such as ‘Red squirrels and woodpeckers’ instead.

For correctly answering the riddle, you’ll receive 20 Clear Drop and 1 Tiny Acorn. The Tiny Acorn is similar to other items in the game such as the Tiny Key and Truth Serum because it is used to unlock lore from a different Trail. However, as of patch 1.0, it seems that the Trail connected to the Tiny Acorn isn’t currently available so keep it close at hand for future chapters. 

Unexpected Audience Answer

Solution Explanation

As for how you would figure this out normally, the main clue is from a cutscene earlier in Chapter 3. In mission 3TH-10 – called ‘O, Captain!’ – Vertin and The Ring hope to meet their classmates at a great oak tree on Foundation grounds called George the Oak. They hope to do this so that they can learn more about the outside world. 

At the very start of that cutscene, as Vertin and the Ring are waiting on their own, you get a brief description of the surroundings which says:

“This oak has been here for 700 years. It has witnessed each of the Parade Ceremonies. Inside the tree hole live some red squirrels and woodpeckers. The clattering sound of The Ring kicking acorns echoes in the spacious hole.” 

If you missed this on your initial viewing, you can watch the cutscene again from the Story Review section of the Atlas. This is the clue which gives you the answer to the Unexpected Audience Trail.

Squirrels and Woodpeckers

That was how to correctly answer the Unexpected Audience Trail Riddle in Reverse: 1999. 

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